Powering the Third Industrial Revolution (aka Why I Go to Work Every Day)

The benefit of being a founder is that you can dream outlandish things, and nobody's around to stop you.

Now that Armory has grown up a bit, I'd like to share the outlandish goal that compels me to go to work every day. This the same reason I started Armory alongside my co-founders Ben & Isaac.

Technological progress drove the first two Industrial Revolutions. The first was due to the advent of the steam engine in the 18th century, which enabled large-scale manufacturing and transformed rural towns into cities. The second was the manufacturing assembly line in the early 20th century, which enabled mass production and gave consumers access to affordable products & transport systems.

Both these first two Industrial Revolutions enabled huge jumps in quality of life for humanity.

We're now in a Third Industrial Revolution, powered by software. Our parents' lives were mostly analog, while our children's lives are largely digital. But we still live in a world today where software failures are largely just an inconvenience. When a web page fails to load, or an app crashes, we complain but work around the issue.

That's changing. Software is now driving our cars and flying our planes. Our very identities are largely becoming digital (don't believe me? If we swapped phones, whose identity would each of us control?). Over the next decade, human quality of life will become deeply intertwined with software. We will become more and more dependent on software to achieve more, go further, and live longer.

This is the Third Industrial Revolution. Another step-change in human quality of life, and it's powered by code. That code is written by humans but it somehow has to then get out into the world, at scale, so it can touch the lives of billions of people. Armory already powers that process of delivering code to the world -- the digital assembly line that turns ideas into impactful features -- for a number of Global 2,000 enterprises. Our customers have a combined market cap of $1.32 trillion and spend $1.7 billion in the cloud.

And we're just getting started, and that gets me to my outlandish belief, which is becoming less outlandish every day:

Armory is powering the Third Industrial Revolution.

Software is the highest leverage way to improve humanity, and Armory is helping companies ship better software, faster. This is leverage-on-leverage. Humanity is just entering the steep part of the curve, and Armory is already impacting the steepness of that curve, even at our current scale as a Series B-funded company.

What's funny about exponential curves is that they always look linear in the rearview mirror. Looking back further than the first Industrial Revolution, the dawn of the Neolithic Age about 12,000 years ago brought the advent of agriculture and property rights. Before that, about 400,000 years ago, Homo erectus started to control fire. Those were both huge step-changes in human quality of life. But they're happening orders of magnitude faster now. Instead of taking hundreds to tens of thousands of years, they're taking hundreds to tens of years. This makes Armory's opportunity for impact even greater, because we enable our customers to build the future faster, which has a massive compounding effect on the steepness of the curve.

I can't think of anything more impactful than enabling humanity to build the future faster. And since the future is rooted in software, that means enabling humanity to ship better software, faster. To go from "idea" to "impactful feature" in minutes instead of months. To give companies a software delivery platform they can trust and use at scale across thousands of software engineers. We are here to maximize software's impact on the world. We unlock innovation by accelerating software delivery. Building this company with the incredible tribe around me is why I come into work every day.